The
vCloud
Air
Compute Service Programming Guide
includes many examples of HTTP requests and responses. These examples show the
workflow and content associated with operations such as browsing, provisioning,
and managing your tenant organization and the compute, networking, and storage
functionality that is available to it.

Example requests generally
conform to the rules listed in
Request Bodies.
Most example responses show only those elements and attributes that are
relevant to the operation being discussed. Ellipses (…) indicate omitted
content within response bodies. Several additional conventions apply.

■

The HTTP
Accept header, which is required in all requests, is
omitted from most examples. See
API Versions
for more about this header and how it is used by the vCloud API.

■

Authorization headers such
as
x-vcloud-authorization are omitted from most
examples. See
vCloud API REST Requests
for more about how authorization headers are used by the vCloud API.

■

All other request headers
required by the vCloud API are included in example requests that are not
fragments of some larger example. Although the examples show these strings
using the character case in which the implementation defines them, header names
and values are case-insensitive, and can be submitted or returned in any
character case. Other HTTP headers, such as
Date,
Content-Length, and
Server, are omitted because they are not relevant to
the specifics of any example.

■

The XML version and
encoding header

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

is included in example requests but omitted from example
responses.

■

In most examples, object
IDs shown in
href
attribute values appear as small integers, for example
vapp-7 or
org/3. In the vCloud API that
vCloud Director
supports, object IDs are universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) as defined by RFC
4122, for example
vapp-f5e185a4-7c00-41f1-8b91-0e552d538101 or
org/89a1a8f9-c518-4f53-960c-950db9e3a1fd. Examples
that show
Role
or
Right objects use the
actual UUIDs for roles and rights, which are invariant across installations.

■

When you access an object
represented by the vCloud API through the Compute Service in
vCloud
AirVirtual
Private Cloud OnDemand, the access to the object is expressed in the URL
returned as the
href
of the object. The URL has the form
API-URL/object-type/id, where

■

API-URL has a form that
includes the
vCloud
Air
region, such as
https://vCloud-Air-region.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api

■

object-type is a string
indicating the type of the object

■

id is the object ID

The vCloud API examples usually illustrate these URLs using the
form https://vcloud.example.com/api/nnnn. As you read the
examples, keep in mind that when you access the vCloud API through the Compute
Service, the beginning portion of the URLs will typically have a
regional-looking portion from the
vCloud
Air
region, so that a vCloud API example that includes a URL with the form
https://vcloud.example.com/api/nnnn corresponds to a
URL with a form similar to
https://vCloud-Air-region.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api.
For details on how to obtain a list of your instances and their attributes, see
Retrieve Instance Attributes for a vCloud Air Compute Service Instance.

REST API examples in
vCloud
Air
Compute Service Programming Guide

Compute
Service API

https://vcloud.example.com/api/...

https://vCloud-Air-region.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api

Such as
https://uk-slough-1-6.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api/...
or
https://us-virginia-1-4.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api/...

Required Roles and
Rights

Where a topic includes an
example, it specifies a prerequisite role that normally has the rights required
to run the example. Some examples can be run by roles with fewer rights, or
different rights. The prerequisite role might include more rights than the
minimum subset required.